


Not That We're Scared

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Endeavour (TV), Inspector Morse & Related Fandoms
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, HONESTLY Morse, M/M, On a scale of 1 to Morse how emotionally repressed are you today?, Season/Series 06 Spoilers, closets are for clothes... and 1960s Englishmen apparently, shame is a hell of a drug, some discussion of injuries, spectacular inability to talk about feelings, stupid queer men being stupid about each other, whump-adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-02-18 12:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18699922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: “Ah, Morse. My knight errant.”Post-series 6, Morse drives DeBryn home. Neither of them are very good at talking about what's just happened to them... or about what either of them wants to happen next.(Formerly titledSing Hallelujah.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Eric and Debi, my beloved betas.
> 
> The title comes from the lyrics of ['Delicate' by Damien Rice](https://youtu.be/VnL3NfhOsBM), which as far as I'm concerned is The Song for Max/Morse.
> 
> Quotes are from The Scottish Play.

“Ah, Morse. My knight errant.”

There was something almost… brittle in the look DeBryn threw him across the lab, something Morse couldn’t quite catch. 

“Knight _erring_ is more like it, I think.” His lips felt somehow numb, tingling distantly - as if from ice or a too-fierce kiss. “It took me all night, and I still…”

Was still nearly too late. Didn’t dream - didn’t sleep - but every time he closed his eyes, he saw DeBryn in molten concrete. Still nearly lost him.

“ _Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?_ ” DeBryn had turned his back and was washing his hands at the sink; the medics had cleaned up most of the blood from his head and wrists, but inevitably some remained: caught at his hairline and throat, tracing vivid at the delicate joint of the man’s jaw and at his wrists where he’d been trussed. He’d apparently given up on trying to tidy himself: instead of his customary fussy formality his shirtsleeves - still spotted with mud and gore - were rolled to his elbows as if he were about to conduct another autopsy. He’d clearly given up, too, on the old thin sleeveless cardigan he’d been wearing: it was folded neatly on a stool in a corner of the lab - coincidentally, or perhaps not, as far out of the doctor’s line of sight as possible. “Evidently not, alas.”

Morse shoved his own hands in his pockets, leaning against the wall - in truth, he was beginning to wonder if he’d fall over without the support - and tried not to look at the old and spreading purple at DeBryn’s arms and at his throat. Tried not to consider - though he’d considered little else for more than twelve hours; since finding the man’s cracked spectacles abandoned on the floor of his lab; _this_ lab - the implications. Tried not to wonder where else he might be bruised, and fought the long-fused and burning temptation to reach out.

To reach out, and touch.

“I’m driving you home, anyway,” he said, too loud and echoing in the sterile barrenness of the lab, and DeBryn stopped what he was doing to turn to him and blink, owlishly, through the cracked and smeared lenses of his spectacles. “You can’t _see_ , Max.”

The lab seemed too big, somehow, in a way it never had before: too big and too echoey, as if he and DeBryn stood on separate continents, looking at each other across the wide Sargasso sea.

“‘Max’, is it, now?” the doctor said, very mildly, and Morse felt the pink heat rise in his cheeks. “You’ve never called me _that_ before.”

Morse opened his mouth to say something and closed it again, with no idea what he had meant to say.

DeBryn seemed to take pity on him, taking up a towel and scrubbing his hands dry before refolding it neatly. “Very well, then. I’m just about done, actually.”

Morse was not sure, even now, what it was that DeBryn had actually been doing in the lab in the first place; unsure, and too uncertain to ask, though the man had made a point of finally sweeping up the mud. He had had, when Bright had first sent him down here, a vague idea that DeBryn might be looking for a spare set of spectacles, but here he was still peering through the cracked lenses that Morse had kept like a talisman in his coat pocket all through the long grey night. 

Childish, really, of course. As childish as not wanting to come back down here again, as not quite wanting to face Max, as half-expecting him to say _this was all your doing, Morse, this was your bloody fault_… And yet. And yet.

And yet.

DeBryn tossed him his car keys from across the room, and despite the warning jingle only over-wrought reflexes kept them from hitting him in the face.

“You didn’t get any sleep last night, did you?” the doctor demanded, eyebrows raised, and added - when Morse said nothing in response - “Sweet, but not terribly practical. Which I suppose is at least consistent...”

Something of Morse’s feelings must have shown in his face at the implied rebuke, because DeBryn’s own expression softened noticeably. “Oh, well. Lay on, MacDuff - to keep to a theme.”

Morse turned, and for once did as he was told.

~*~

They made their way to the car in relative silence: Morse got the impression that DeBryn, who had put on his coat but left the bloodied cardigan behind him, was deliberately avoiding people, perhaps out of social embarrassment at the state he was still in or simply out of a reluctance to explain.

Force of habit led DeBryn to the driver’s side of his little cream Standard Eight; he clicked his tongue, exasperated at himself, before adjusting his course, and waited patiently for Morse to open the passenger door for him from the inside. Morse felt, for reasons he could not quite articulate, that it would be... polite to go round and open the door for the man, but before he could make the decision to move DeBryn was already in the car, leaning back against the leather seat with unconscious relief as he firmly closed the door on himself - and, Morse noted, clicked it locked again afterwards.

“Are you alright?”

It was, perhaps, a stupid question, but in the moment it was all Morse could think of to say, and DeBryn seemed to consider his answer before he gave it.

“...No, Morse. I’m not. But…” He looked at Morse over, rather than through, his glasses, as if he could not both tell the truth _and_ see him clearly. “I will be.”

He didn’t know what to do with such unvarnished honesty: it seemed both red-hot and fragile, a kind of molten glass he lacked the skill to handle.

Morse turned his face to the front, and drove in silence instead.

~*~

DeBryn didn’t speak again on the half-hour or so’s drive back to his cottage outside Oxford; on the few occasions Morse found an excuse to sneak a glance at the passenger seat he appeared to be dozing fitfully, eyes half-closed and face turned slightly away. Hardly surprising, really: if Morse had spent the night restlessly prowling Oxford, with or without the assistance of his City colleagues, Max’s own night could scarcely have been any more restful.

(He wanted, more than anything else, to ask _what did they do to you_ , but as with any of Max’s other skeletons he had no faith that he’d have the stomach for the reply.)

When he hit the brakes outside DeBryn’s cottage the doctor startled awake; Morse, risking one more look to his left under cover of reversing, saw the man’s eyes briefly widen in nameless and uncomprehending panic before reality reasserted itself.

“It’s all right,” he said, quietly, before he could help himself, and DeBryn’s lips lifted briefly in a faint wry smile.

“You’ll have me home safe soon,” he agreed, and Morse frowned for a moment in pursuit of the quote before realising the words were his own. 

“Well,” Morse started, and stopped.

“Yes, well, I can hardly call you a liar, although a greater pedant than I might quibble over the definition of the word ‘soon’.”

Once again, it was a remark to which Morse had no response - other than to open the car door, and the few tired moments it took DeBryn to fumble with the unfamiliar placement of the passenger-side door lever were enough to allow him to walk around and open the door for him instead.

Again uncertain of what to do next, he watched DeBryn feed the house key into the lock, his eyes now drawn unavoidably to where he had most avoided looking: the still-livid red marks at Max’s wrists, exposed again now as the sleeve of his coat rode back. Apparently conscious of the trajectory of Morse’s gaze, the doctor hunched his shoulders, dropping his hands again as hurriedly as was feasible to push open the door; Morse hurriedly dragged his eyes away, feeling he had been caught somewhere he did not belong.

Inside, the little cottage was as immaculate as it had been on that summer evening when Morse had first allowed himself to pester DeBryn at home, and at the sight of the unruffled calm beyond his front door he thought he heard the man let out a brief, shallow sigh of relief.

“One expected as much, of course. But still.”

So it _had_ been a sigh, then, and Morse nodded, hovering awkwardly on the doorstep.

“I doubt they would have expected you to keep anything incriminating or useful at home, or they would have taken your house key as well when they…” He stopped again, once more uncertain.

_When they took you._

“- Yes, quite.”

DeBryn paused in the process of taking his coat off to give Morse another raised-eyebrow look over those _bloody_ cracked spectacles, and Morse could swear he still felt the weight of them in his coat pocket where he’d kept them all night.

“Don’t just stand there like an uncertain housecat, Morse, you’re making the doormat look untidy. Come in.”

Half-startled, Morse once again did as he was bidden, stepping through and shutting the front door behind him. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want company,” he admitted. “After last night…”

“Well, I’m hardly going to send you back to the station on the bus in your current state.” DeBryn nudged him out of the way to hang his coat up on the hook, and held out his hand for Morse’s own. “You haven’t _slept_ , Morse. Remember?”

Morse shrugged, uncomfortable, and attempted to disguise it with the movement of removing his coat. “That’s not that unusual. I’d cope.”

“...Morse.” In the faded light of the hallway, DeBryn’s face lifted to his. “You _do_ realise that what happened last night wasn’t your fault, don’t you?”

Something about the angle of DeBryn’s jaw, tilted to his, the wide Atlantic-blue eyes watching him unreadably, left any response caught with a hitch in Morse’s throat.

He wanted… he wanted to say _it was because of me, they did this to you because of me_, he wanted to drown his thoughts out alone in beer and opera until the world stopped spinning beneath him, he wanted to be alone, he wanted to hide - here - forever, he wanted…

He wanted, suddenly, Max.

In the stained-glass light of a dozen bridges burning, he leaned down just enough to press the ghost of a kiss to Max’s lips.

There was a long, indrawn breath of a moment, as if a chasm opened beneath him - as it had last night, finding those spectacles in the mud - until Max again closed the gap.

“Morse,” he said, helplessly. “Morse…”

And Morse finally - and just as helplessly - gave in.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lesson learned: write the _entire fic_ before deciding on a title. This was originally called _Sing Hallelujah_ , which will probably be the title for my next fic in this ship/fandom.
> 
> Thanks again to Eric and Debi, my brilliant betas. Quotes are from The Scottish Play and Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

“Ah, Morse. My knight errant.”

DeBryn wasn’t sure what had made him say it: some flicker of residual fear, perhaps, or of the futile anger and humiliation that had kept him wriggling without success at his bonds throughout the preceding long cold night.

(What he would have done, if he _had_ somehow managed to free himself, he had no idea. A moot point, anyway.)

Morse returned the remark with a bleak, blank look. “Knight _erring_ is more like it, I think.” He paused, seeming to force out the words like bullets through his teeth. “It took me all night, and I still…”

Still _what_ , DeBryn wondered. Morse looked, somehow, both frighteningly intense yet as if he were speaking to someone else, some _where_ else. As if he were still seeing something that was not the laboratory’s reassuring cool sterility. It was a look so unreadable as to be almost frightening; as almost to make DeBryn wish he were brave enough to remove his glasses again.

He turned his back, instead, and busied himself with trying for the _N_ th time to remove the damn dirt and blood - _his_ blood - from his hands. He really ought, he thought suddenly, to have asked those… men… to have allowed him to put his gloves on when they arrived at his office door, and the very idea made his lips twist with bitter irony.

“ _Will all Great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?_ ” DeBryn took refuge, as he often did when his own thoughts could not or would not suffice, in those of others; hardly the most innovative of quotations on this occasion, perhaps, but that couldn’t be helped. (He would, he thought, be washing for days - _weeks_ \- before he removed all trace of last night from his skin.) “Evidently not, alas.”

“I’m driving you home, anyway,” Morse said, sounding too loud, too forced in the disinfected-and-scrubbed quietness of the room, and in spite of himself DeBryn turned to stare at the younger man through the smears and cracks of his recently-returned spectacles. 

“You can’t _see_ , Max,” Morse added, seeming to feel his first statement had been insufficient - seeming to _dare_ DeBryn to object - and somehow the unhoped-for use of his Christian name was like one more unexpected punch to the gut.

(Morse was slouching against the wall, hands in his trouser pockets, a pale and angular ghost of his usual wary insouciance. It was a sight which normally made DeBryn want him very much; today, though, it only made him see more clearly what a state the man was in, the realisation merely another twist of the knife. On any other day, he’d have given… oh, perhaps at least a year’s wages to hear him use that name, but now? After everything?)

“‘Max’, is it, now?” DeBryn forced himself to ask, voice as mild as decades of self-tuition in suppressing his own feelings could make it. “You’ve never called me _that_ before.”

Morse flushed unforgivably at the remark, and DeBryn - admittedly not for the first time, when it came to this particular attractive young detective - felt himself give in. “Very well, then.” He gave his still-grubby hands one last, useless, scrub with the handtowel, before refolding it neatly. “I’m just about done, actually.”

Morse had not asked - which was just as well, for DeBryn could not in all honesty have told him - what it was that he had actually gone to the morgue to _do_. Partly, certainly, it had been because he had feared that if he did not return immediately, he never would again. And he was grateful, certainly, to find that - once he had swept out the last of the filthy mud - the lab was, to him, as it always had been. Of everything that had happened in the last twelve hours, he thought, the lab was actually least likely to feature in his dreams - just as well, really, because he loved his job. Even now. Even after all this.

Still. This was no mental path to lose oneself down, and he burrowed hastily in the drawer where he habitually kept his keys while working, tossing them to Morse with only trace amounts of embarrassment at having to be driven.

(After all, for once he could not dispute that Morse was right: he was in no fit state to drive at present. Not only because his vision remained limited at best with such cracked spectacles: his wrists and ankles were still vociferously registering their complaints at having been bound for so long, and what would happen if he had to stamp on the brakes he shuddered to think.)

Morse fumbled the catch - not like him - although of course he still made it, and DeBryn raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t get any sleep last night, did you?”

Morse had no response, the usual indication that DeBryn had scored a palpable hit, and he felt a quirk of unbecoming irritation - probably occasioned by the constant flickers of pain from his ribs and wrists - at once again having to act like the man’s bloody nursemaid. “Sweet, but not terribly practical. Which is at least consistent…”

The look on Morse’s handsome, wide-eyed face sent a stab through him that had nothing to do with cracked ribs. Hell. He’d gone too far: perhaps one last leftover flash of residual humiliation that, after all, was none of Morse’s fault.

“Oh, well. Lay on, MacDuff, to keep to a theme.”

It was another remark to which Morse, for once, had no response - not even a jab on the predictability of the quote - and DeBryn followed him out of the lab in silence.

~*~

Having squeamishly hurried them both out of the confines of the morgue itself, Morse allowed DeBryn to precede him, and so he deliberately chose the route which he knew was least likely to contain staff. Bad enough that last night’s events were probably already being broadcast near and far - medics were second only to policemen for their ability to gossip - without having to actually explain, in person, what it was that had led him to look such a state. As it was he knew already that he would never again be able to view that knitted waistcoat with equanimity, and had in fact left it back in the lab for just that reason. He’d burn it, perhaps, as soon as he could decently justify a garden bonfire.

For once, luck was with them both, and they met nobody else on the short walk to DeBryn’s beloved little Standard Eight. Instinct and muscle-memory sent him automatically to the driver’s side; he tutted at himself, irritated by his own foolishness, before adjusting his course and forcing himself to wait patiently while Morse opened the passenger door from the inside.

Locking the door before allowing himself to carefully lean back against the leather seats - he was currently, and for several good reasons, less than inclined towards using the seatbelt - was the first time since last night that DeBryn had felt anything approaching secure. Perhaps he’d stay here forever, he thought wildly: safe in his car, Morse beside him; forever, or perhaps just for a while.

“Are you alright?” It was, perhaps, a stupid question from Morse, but then it did at least pull DeBryn out of the stupidity of his own childish thoughts. He had, at first, no idea how to answer, though it was an answer Morse deserved far more than most. Stupid, too, to attempt to lie to those most intense clear blue eyes.

“...No, Morse, I’m not. But…”

But what? But at least he wasn’t dead? 

(He could hardly say the thought of death had failed to occur to him, lying cold on the dusty pick-up truck bed, and bound as that poor bastard Binks had been. In truth he had been shocked at how much the concept of lying on the slab as so many others had appalled him; but then again, nobody liked a personal case.)

But at least Morse was not dead, either?

(“You must be bloody stupid,” he’d spat, when they took the gag off to allow him to drink, “If you think that Morse - that any of them - are idiotic enough to waltz into a trap this obvious.”

It was a remark impertinent enough to reward him with an immediate punch to the guts, which would have been bad enough, except that - sprawled, coughing and spitting on the ground - he also knew damn well that Morse, at least, _was_ exactly that bloody stupid.)

He looked across at Morse: over, rather than through, his spectacles. Though he was ashamed to admit that for over twelve hours he’d have done almost anything to have them back, somehow in this moment he could not face Morse with 20:20 vision.

“...But I will be.”

How true it was he couldn’t say; still, it seemed truth enough for Morse, who finally averted his gaze and drove in silence.

~*~

Morse did not speak again on the drive back to DeBryn’s cottage, and - lulled by the comfort that had been so distinctly lacking of late, and the unexpected security of Morse’s presence at his right - DeBryn repeatedly found himself drifting off. It was a lapse he’d never normally dream of permitting himself, in such proximity to another man - he had no idea if he talked in his sleep, and a holy terror of what he might say if he did - but either he had remained silent or he had said nothing incriminating, for the next thing he knew was the sound of brakes grinding outside his own front door.

Half-asleep, he seemed to feel himself thrown once more against the side of the flat-bed; opening his eyes to blurred vision, he could taste again the strip torn from his own labcoat thrust thick and choking between his teeth.

“It’s all right,” he heard Morse say, quietly, from somewhere close, and suddenly reality seemed to reassert herself. DeBryn pulled himself together, realising that he could see perfectly clearly - at least, with one eye - and that Morse was here, in his own car, beside him.

“You’ll have me home safe soon,” he managed to agree, and even found the vestiges of a smile for the younger man.

Morse frowned, as if he’d expected a quotation and found none. “Well,” he started - and stopped, again seeming not to know what to say.

He’d hardly ever known Morse this quiet, this… elliptical. (At least, not in moments unrelated to his love life.) As if he walked a tightrope blind, all his nervous energy bent on avoiding a misstep he could not anticipate.

“Yes, well, I can hardly call you a liar, although a greater pedant than I might quibble over the definition of the word ‘soon’.” DeBryn sounded unconscionably brisk, even to his own ears - but then, better that than the alternative - and once again Morse had no response but to open the car door.

Still hazy, and unused in all his years of ownership to opening his car on the left-hand side, it took DeBryn a few fumbling moments to work out the placement of the handle and angle of the lock mechanism, and so Morse had enough time to step around the car and gallantly open the door for him. At least by now he had had enough time to collect himself properly - more or less - and he fumbled in his pockets with the bare minimum of awkwardness to find his house key.

He could feel Morse’s eyes on him as he unlocked his front door, and despite himself could not resist glancing aside to find those startling eyes - relentless in unpicking so many scenes of crime - fixed with a kind of fascinated horror on the raw red rope-marks at his wrists. His ears burning with a shame he could not quite explicate, DeBryn dropped his hands until the marks were decently covered by the sleeves of the coat, instead shouldering the door open…

And breathing out a sigh he hadn’t realised he had been holding in when he saw the hallway beyond his door was as serene and neat as he’d left it.

“One expected as much, of course. But still…”

Morse nodded, though he remained stock-still behind DeBryn on the doorstep.

“I doubt they would have expected you to keep anything incriminating or useful at home,” he agreed. “Or they would have taken your house key as well when they…”

He stopped again abruptly, tugging at his right ear as he tended to do when thinking uncomfortable thoughts, and DeBryn frowned. He’d known, of course, from the outset that such proof as he had was of no interest to the men who’d come to his office door so late at night: proof was something they - or their friends - manufactured on command to fit the circumstances. It was a revolt, of course, to all his professional and personal ethics; what was more revolting was that he knew that had they demanded _he_ manufacture it for them he would quite possibly have done it. He’d have tried to leave traces, of course, clues for someone with Morse’s stubbornly exacting persistence to follow to the truth, but faced with the knife and chisel he had no illusions that he was brave enough to resist giving in. Certainly, had they demanded it, he would have handed over his house key without significant demur.

(Not like Morse, of course: Morse would have stared them all down, pride and terror and disgust combined - and, of course, would almost certainly have had his head bashed in for his defiant pains, skinny body left to be scrutinised on DeBryn’s cold slab. Morse, in so many ways, was nothing like DeBryn at all.)

“- Yes, quite.” This was another mental rabbit-hole he had no intention of falling too far down, at least not under Morse’s clear-eyed scrutiny, and DeBryn consciously briskened his voice as he eyed the man still lurking on his doorstep with an expression that suggested he’d just been caught trespassing.

“Well, don’t just stand there like an uncertain housecat, Morse, you’re making the doormat look untidy. Come in.”

He really _was_ like a cat sometimes, DeBryn considered wryly: the kind of cat who’d rather sleep on a high-wire than on a cushion. The Cat Who Walked By Himself, perhaps, who walked by his wild lone and to whom all places were alike. And it was true, as Kipling had it, that Man was wild too…

For once in his life, at any rate, Morse condescended to do as he was bidden and stepped over the threshold. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want company,” he admitted, ducking his head under the lintel, and DeBryn felt something cold as the chisel rise in his chest at the sudden idea of being left alone. “After last night…”

Oh, God. After last night? After last night, he might never want to be alone again, though the idea was so desperately impossible - for someone like him - that he had to turn aside at the bite of it, and disguised it by gently moving Morse out of the way as he hung up his coat.

But if _he_ couldn’t be alone, then Morse - who still looked as though he might fall over at the least provocation - certainly shouldn’t be.

“Well, I’m hardly going to send you back to the station on the bus in your current state,” he informed Morse, and held out his hand authoritatively for the man’s coat. Morse stared at him blankly. “You haven’t _slept_ , Morse. Remember?”

Morse only shrugged, looking positively teenager-like in his mulishness. “That’s not that unusual. I’d cope.”

“...Morse.”

Finally, DeBryn’s still-addled head had begun to put two and two together and make a very creditable four. He wasn’t personally familiar with a Catholic guilt complex - and Morse, of course, had never been a Catholic - but he’d seen the symptoms often enough.

He looked up at Morse, caught in the half-shuttered sunlight from the door-glass, his hair glinting red and golden, and his face…

A poet might describe it, or an artist - a Study in Angles, perhaps; a kind of restless movement, stilled - but DeBryn knew all too well he was neither. In the end, after all, he was just another doctor; still, at least that meant there was one thing he could perhaps manage to fix.

“You _do_ realise that what happened last night wasn’t your fault, don’t you?”

Morse still said nothing; only looked at him with Arctic-blue eyes that seemed too big in his too-pale, angular face: a look of terror and need and want and longing, all desperately being restrained by a hair’s breadth; and suddenly DeBryn knew what was going to happen before it did.

The kiss, when it came, was so delicate that he might have missed it - have imagined it as just another of those strange, fragile moments between them that inevitably came to nothing - if he hadn’t already imagined it so many times before.

“Morse…” he said, helplessly, lost under Morse’s expression of naked fear and pride and pleading.

“Morse…” DeBryn said one more time, voice barely above a murmur, and Morse bowed his head as if in prayer to kiss him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I think DeBryn would actually have been rather braver than he gives himself credit for in this, especially if he’d been ordered to do something that would have implicated Morse and the City boys. But shame is a hell of a drug.


End file.
